Despite significant advances in vehicle and highway safety, traffic accidents continue to cause many injuries and deaths. Among the dangers are rapid changes in weather and road conditions that may cause huge multi-car accidents because drivers are unable to react quickly enough to slow down or avoid the other vehicles, thus causing a chain reaction or pile-up accident. For instance, weather conditions such as snow, ice, fog, hail, and heavy rain can create extremely dangerous conditions in a very short amount of time. Further, conditions in good weather such as smoke from field burning can quickly create a very dangerous condition that results in a traffic pile up.
While forms of road condition monitoring and warnings exist, such as cameras to view highway conditions and overhead signs to report conditions, these often do not provide detection and warning of dangerous condition quickly enough when conditions are changing rapidly. Further, technology such as cameras can be obstructed by weather conditions, thus making them unusable.
Outside of urban areas, the detection and warning of dangerous conditions are even less effective as the cost of installing and monitoring system discourage governmental entities from instituting such systems, and limited communications lessen the effectiveness of systems that do exist.